Everyone in this world loves stories and good stories can capture anyone’s attention as intended, and deliver the right message across. Storytelling has a crucial role to play in the MBA admissions essay writing process. Of course, it’s given that you need to lay a strong foundation for MBA admissions essay writing by building the right structure in advance using the structured thinking approach and then try to visualize your application or specific essays using a storyboard type of visualization technique. This leads you to a point that you have the right framework and the right flow of content for your essay. The ideal next step is to deliver the content in a coherent and convincing way. How this can be achieved?
The answer is — by building the right stories that are complete in themselves and also linking them together to build a flow of thoughts. The crux of storytelling is linking the ideas with emotions. It’s the most powerful tool that companies and CEOs use in multiple ways for example to convince clients, motivate employees, place their products in the minds of customers, etc.
In my experience with the MBA applicants, the trend in MBA admissions essay writing that I have noticed in the past several years is that two key elements are usually missed or overlooked by most people. Creativity in weaving stories out of your facts and profile points, And failing to bring the emotion or passion into your story. Hence in the end it remains dry and fact-oriented which doesn’t connect with many adcoms. Think about it like this, facts and information are already there in your resume and a plethora of other questions that you answer in your MBA applications, then what’s the need for the essays?
Precisely, to see what is inside the candidate, what’s beyond the facts and figures of your profile. This is exactly what storytelling will help to bring out. Many would argue that it’s a very creative skill and not everyone can have this kind of ability. Agreed, but you don’t need to be a master to create your own story. You already have all the groundwork, research, and ideas laid out, all you need to do is retrospect, reflect, and plan your life. You only need to build your own story for now and who knows If you improve on this skill of MBA admissions essay writing, this is going to help you in your post-MBA professional life as well.
After analyzing hundreds of essays and applications, I have created a simple method for MBA admissions essay writing, which helps to bring the art of storytelling in the MBA admissions essay writing process. Here are the steps :
- Identify the characters
The first and foremost step is to identify the characters. Every story has some characters and that’s the first thing you need to decide. If you are applying this to one essay, then think about it based on the question that is being asked, but if you are applying this for your whole application, think about yourself even more holistically. You would have seen many dramas, sitcoms or movies. There are usually several characters, even in case there is the main character, still, there are some other smaller ones that add critical mass. Now your characters can be
- Your key projects or enriching professional experiences
- Your hobbies: reading, music, dancing, sports, etc.
- Your motivations or values in life
- Your school? Your office? Your home
Any of the above which have things to tell and are significant enough to build the characters of your story. Make a list of your characters depending on the essay questions or in general about your profile. This is re-usable, so you can spend some time to think about these in advance and then selecting and adding more according to different essays.
- Combine the characters together to weave your story
This simply means that you need to prioritize and see which characters fit well in your story and how they all link together. For example, sports give you abilities like not giving up, teamwork, positive aggression and many of those are valid in multiple other scenarios as well like for any challenging project, difficult team members, or situations.
Basically, for each character define their traits and then with those traits you can easily identify which of the characters can be included in your story. You will find the overlaps. You can also create Venn diagrams of the characters to clearly see the overlaps.
There is a quote from Pixar about storytelling that explains this — “Combine characters and hop over detours”
So, pick your characters and prioritize what you need to tell about them. Avoid going into too much detail about one character and try to stick to the core aspects which are relevant to your MBA admissions essay writing process or MBA application.
- Find or build Inter-connections
The next step is to connect these characters and their stories together. What are the points where they converge or where their paths intersect? These are the points where you can lead on from one character to the other. This may sound like making a movie right now, but trust me when you have done step 1 and step 2 on paper already, this will seem very logical and it will come naturally.
Points of intersections can also help you to generate ideas about connecting things together and how one part leads on to the other parts with a smooth flow. Sometimes, it may be hard to find them or connect your parts, and that’s where you need to be a little creative and add some fillers. For example, if two things are completely unrelated, then you can try to find something that may be a subset of both or has some overlap from both parts. So basically, creating the interlink if it doesn’t exist.
- Placement, style, and focus
The last step is the placement of characters and stories in the right places. Think about movies again (I guess I am a big fan of movies :D), some of them are flashback, some go to and fro at different times, etc. Just follow your heart here and try different combinations if needed to see what works well. Run it with your mentor/consultant/friends etc. and pick your style. Once you have your style of MBA admissions essay writing, strategically place all the characters accordingly in your MBA admissions essay story. This is the final construct or the editing part where you may need to let go of some things again and prioritize. It’s like tweaking the stories or shredding some parts in order for them to fit the broader picture.
A focal lens is needed for the final construct wherein you need to let go of the parts that are not linked together. Filter out the aspects that are misaligned or outliers in your graph and as they say statistically: Find the line of best fit!
Your focal lens can be based on two things — Firstly what is being asked in the essay, Secondly the prominent or repeated traits from your characters. Stick to things that are big and significant. No need to cover everything.
Storytelling in MBA admissions essay writing helps you to create impactful answers which connect well with the adcoms. It helps you to think holistically about your profile and bring in the right content as needed based on the question being asked. Usually your right more than 20 essays for your MBA admissions, and if you follow this approach, definitely your skill is going to improve.
There is a TEDx talk about learning a new skill that says yes you need 10000 hours to practice to master a skill but to get to a reasonably good level, you need only 20 hours. So, a few essays would easily take you to that level. Remember one thing, everyone relates to the journey and that should be your focus. Since you cannot have the ending because the MBA is not the end. Your journey till today and your journey that you are envisioning is something that the adcoms would like to see and is something that people can relate to. Situations may be different for everyone but journeys can be relatable. We need to bring out the emotion and passion in our journey.
There is one more piece to the MBA admissions essay writing apart from Structured thinking, Visualization, and Storytelling, and that is Personalization. Personalization is an art of making the essay your own and different from any other applicant. It’s covered in some parts of storytelling, but it needs to be understood separately in detail as well. With these 4 key principles, one can write impactful MBA admissions essays and also develop the MBA admissions essay writing skill along with, to help in other aspects of life as well.
By DJ (Dhiraj Jha)
Strategy & Innovation – Samsung (S.Korea) | MBA Mentor | Tech Enthusiast | Thinker
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